US tv series (1998-2001; vt 7 Days). Paramount Network Television Productions for the UPN network. Created by Christopher and Zachary Crowe. Directors include Charles Correll, David Livingston and John McPherson. Writers include Stephen Beck, Harry Cason and Tim Finch. Cast includes Don Franklin, Jonathan LaPaglia and Justina Vail. 66 45-minute episodes. Colour.

The Backstep Project is a secret National Security Agency Time Travel project reverse-engineered from Technology obtained in 1947 from a crashed AlienSpaceships in Roswell, New Mexico (see UFOs). The maximum range of the resulting Time Machine or Chronosphere is seven days into the past (hence the series title and "Backstep"), owing to the restricted amount of the required "Element-115" fuel available. Former CIA operative Commander Frank Parker (LaPaglia) pilots the Chronosphere on missions to change past events which would harm or have harmed US national security. He is aided by Dr Olga Vukavitch (Vail) from Russia, any incipient romance invariably being frustrated by Backsteps and Time Paradoxes; the backup chrononaut is Captain Craig Donovan (Franklin), who never succeeds in replacing Parker. Project Backstep operates from a desert facility in Nevada called Never Never Land, to which the Chronosphere is returned by an NSA recovery team after each outing and (typically) crash-landing. Never Never Land also houses surviving aliens from the 1947 crash, kept in Suspended Animation. Many episodes deal with espionage and similar plots against the US which must be foiled via time travel; another alien or "Time Gremlin" also appears, and there are attempts by Russian agents to steal portions of the technology (Russia has recovered its own UFO from a Siberian crash but lags behind US understanding of related Physics). Seven Days may have been inspired by the success of TheX-Files (1993-2002), to which it bore some similarities. [GSt/DRL]

Connect with SFE

SFE Blog

We passed a couple of major milestones on 1st August: the SFE is now over 4.5 million words, of which John Clute’s own contribution has now exceeded 2 million. (For comparison, the 1993 second edition was 1.3 million words, and … Continue reading →

We’ve reached a couple of milestones recently. The SFE gallery of book covers now has more than 10,000 images: this one seemed appropriate for the 10,000th. Our series of slideshows of thematically linked covers has continued to grow, and Darren Nash of … Continue reading →

We’ve been talking for a while about new features to add to the SFE, and another one has gone live today: the Gallery, which collects together covers for sf books and links them back to SFE entries. To quote from … Continue reading →